You really need a way to clean the air in a room continually when people are around.” “It’s not much use cleaning a room in the middle of the night, and then people walk in in the morning and start exhaling viruses in the air. But its harmful side effects on people mean the lamps can be turned on only when a room is empty, limiting effectiveness, Brenner says. Humans have known for over a hundred years that UV radiation can kill deadly germs, and hospitals have used germicidal 254-nm UVC to sterilize objects for decades. Far-UVC is a passive device, it’s just up there in the ceiling.” Masks, vaccination, and social distancing all involve people having to make decisions. “We’ve really lacked the tools to fight COVID. “If the technology had been well developed five years earlier and far-UVC lights had been widely installed, potentially the COVID crisis could’ve been unlike what it has turned out to be,” says David Brenner, director of Columbia University’s Center for Radiological Research, and an author of the paper. “Widely installed far-UVC could maybe prevent the next pandemic or the next yearly influenza epidemic.” -David Brenner, Columbia University Getting there, though, will require new light sources, regulations, and increasing public awareness that far-UV light is safe. The study, published in Scientific Reports, suggest that far-UVC lamps could be an effective way to fight the spread of viral diseases like COVID and influenza. As long as the lights were on, microbe levels remained low even as more were continually sprayed into the room. Now researchers show that a type of shorter-wavelength UVC light, in the far-UV region, that is safe for people can kill 98 percent of microbes floating around in a room. It can also penetrate human skin and eyes, causing skin cancer and cataracts. Those devices emit UV light at a wavelength of 254 nanometers, which destroys bacteria and viruses by wreaking havoc on their DNA or RNA. Ultraviolet light became an important tool to fight the COVID-19 pandemic with virus-zapping UV robots plying hospitals and airports, and a plethora of personal UV gadgets to sanitize phones and keyboards.
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